In hearing the discussions from today’s NBCU State of the Industry Forum recently it’s pretty clear that “Legacy TV” needs to be dead as a term, and be replaced with Premium vs. Non-Premium (UGC aka the bad stuff) Video and Feed vs. Intent-driven video.

There are only three buckets of premium and non-premium video now:

1. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter = Channel Surfing

2. Youtube, Facebook Watch, Netflix, Amazon, OTT/Web = VOD

3. Linear Television, Live OTT = Live Video

Because the “Duopoly” thrives off both Premium and Non-Premium Digital Video to maximize margins, it mixes the two, leaving advertisers to buy against a blended inventory. This has led to where we are today: advertisers are buying against blended digital video options on Google and FB for reach, then buying Premium-only video from traditional media providers causing confusion about the true value of Premium vs. Non-Premium.

Since it is highly unlikely that the platforms will totally change this blended model, the best opportunity is for the Premium Video rights holders to direct sell against “attention time” and audience profiles across all screens.

For most of Delmondo’s top cross-platform video analytics customers, our ability to measure of average watch time per platform is the #1 metric their entire organization uses. We’ve created a great system to generate blended KPIs based on Average Minute Audience (AMA), social viewership or engagement that can be mapped to the viewer data consuming that content via authentication.

Integration of all viewing pieces (social, OTT and linear) will be necessary to map viewing audiences in the connected TV and OTT universe over the next few years and to bring greater scale to the space.

“Now that everybody is building their own OTT experience or partnering with other platforms to build an OTT experience, we’re getting closer to that ability to share the data and give it the full picture,” said Nick Cicero, founder and CEO of social video analytics firm Delmondo. “In the next five years, we’ll see exponentially large sample sizes for the data and viewership that’s happening on connected devices and TV.”

Several organizations and coalitions are hard at work addressing these fragmentation issues. For instance, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s OTT Identifier for Advertising aims to develop a universal standard for an identifier that could be used across all devices, a development that AppNexus’ Eric Hoffert anticipates could take three to five years. “The goal is to have a single syntax and format that can allow for a consistent, persistent device ID,” he said. “It’s effectively a cookie for connected TV, and it would be something that could be resettable for users who don’t want to be tracked, just like you can do with mobile identifiers.”